Proxima B2B is a company that was built by salespeople, for salespeople. We select new hires in part based on whether they share our group aversion to time-wasting "sales systems" that take salespeople out of the field. Many of us were known at former corporate sales positions for being the rule-breaking lone-rangers who never seemed to enter all of our data into the CRM. We didn't care if it was Salesforce or one of the more tedious predecessors like ACT, Goldmine Sales Tracking, or some custom dBBASE system (yes we are dating ourselves if you're of a certain vintage along the PC timeline).
Some of us were frequently called to the sales manager's office, at our previous jobs, to discuss our chronically over-due or undone paperwork that would have gotten us reimbursed for our travel and other expenses. We did the math, though, and figured out that time spent reporting for pennies cost us dollars of earned commissions. In short, we're an experienced bunch and one of our common attributes is a deep distrust of spending sales time adding data to the computer.
Why all this preamble? It's necessary background for what follows:
Proxima B2B is now a company making more money every month--for our clients, and for ourselves--using a sophisticated predictive data analytics and sales planning platform that most of us fought building and implementing tooth-and-nail. We're still resisting naming it something cliche like LeadNet.
We were wrong! After years of being asked to waste time doing everything from entering contacts into CRM systems to participating in meaningless quarterly forecasting games, arcane expense planning and reporting, to the more recent time-sinks of social media threads, logging AdWords leads, and the flavor-of-the-year account planning technologies, we were pretty committed to staying the course. Some of us had become experts at resisting any new gizmo that would eat our time for the promise of better sales results. It never seemed worth the weekends of data entry.
About four years ago, one of our project managers pointed out that most sales technology, new and old, is focused on rewarding the wrong behaviors. The tools provide sales leadership with ever-increasing quantities of data about every lead and prospect that has ever come anywhere near the company's sales message, but delivers nothing but a longer to-do/call list to the field force. Every web site visit. Every ad-word inquiry. Every convention badge swipe. All sliced, diced, entered, regurgitated, rated, tagged over-due for follow-up, and becoming ever more quickly dated bit of data.
If Proxima B2B sales staff were going to use technology to add to our database of career contacts and the business intelligence we've learned along the the road, it was going to have to look for opportunities. It couldn't be another platform gathering input to tell management what we were behind on. The platform had to look forward, dredge through the junk leads and dead prospects and help us spend our time on the best cases. The best prospects have already done their homework and know they are shopping. We had to build a system that helped us know which ones were ready to buy so we could spend our time learning about the business, the needs, and what was between the prospect's own research and making a sale for a Proxima B2B client.
Truly game-changing predictive sales analytics have arrived at Proxima B2B, over the complaints. The system focuses on showing our team members where to never waste another minute. It takes incoming data and uses algorithms and the accrued expertise of 300+ combined sales years to help us decide who not to call on. It sorts through mountains of available budgetary and purchasing information, technology utilization at prospect firms, professional services utilization, press and results notices, hiring patterns and another 48 metrics that add precision to our decision to NOT LOSE MONEY CHASING THE WRONG LEADS.
Time is money, as somebody famous and many motivational posters have said. Not wasting time chasing garbage leads, means we have time to lavish detailed, new century customized attention and research on the prospects who are likely to actually buy the solutions and services we sell on behalf of our technology and professional services clients.
Different times call for different tools and the Proxima B2B predictive sales analytics and revenue cycle management platform are changing our results. We may be able to put our new platform, and our experienced people, to work building your revenue pipeline. Call for your consultation today--it's no-risk expertise, and you decide whether to buy more when you know more. Because we believe that an educated shopper is a great client.
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